Mother, may I?

Let's pretend you meet someone: maybe at a party, maybe at work. Let's say you start talking about this and that, and you find out they didn't go to college. Would you start saying things like "Why wouldn't you go to college? You seem smart enough?" Would you wonder about their financial situation or if they could cut it. Perhaps you might think some of these things, but you wouldn't say them out loud. You wouldn't be that rude. If later in the conversation, they commented on something, you wouldn't dismiss them with a "oh, you've never been to college; you wouldn't understand." And yet, people feel they can act this way towards people who haven't been parents.

For some reason, plenty of folks think that commenting on someone's status as a parent is fair game. I take that back: commenting about the fact that someone isn't a a parent is fair game. You'd never say to someone, "You're a parent? Good Lord, that must be some sort of train wreck!" And the assumption seems to be that everyone who chooses to be a parent must be amazing at it, and, frankly, I can't think of anything that everyone is good at.

The decision to be (or not be) a parent is a biggie. There's a lot of factors that go into it. Sometimes these factors are out of your control. I had a friend (yes, really; this is not me, so no sympathetic, off-to-the-side emails are needed) who was trying to have a child for years: lots of IVF and other treatments. It was really tough for her and she was pretty private about it. And yet, I saw coworkers go up to her and just flat out ask her when she was going to start having kids. "Oh, you'd be such a great mother!" And, unless she wanted to tell them about the pain she was going through (emotional and physical), she had to just fake smile and sort of shrug off the question.

There are hundreds of reasons someone might choose to not be a parent, many of them private. Maybe you can't afford it, maybe your partner has a secret drinking problem, maybe you think you might not be good at it. Maybe, like my friend, you are trying but not succeeding. Maybe it's just not your thing. Whatever the reason, it's most likely not something you want to talk about over the water cooler at work in front of semi-strangers. And saying things like, "I don't know what people like you do on Mother's Day" probably isn't helping.

I know that you're just making conversation or being friendly. You don't mean anything nasty by asking these questions. But before you comment on someone's status as a parent, ask yourself if you have a couple of decisions you've made in your life where you'd like to keep the reasons behind that choice private.